The Westlaw research system is a popular online service that provides lawyers and other professionals a highly effective way to research legal, financial, business, and news information, for example. The system, vast in its scope, includes thousands of specialized databases. In many instances, the databases include topical collections of documents that are associated with tables of content (TOCs) or hierarchical tree-like data structures, which facilitate navigation and browsing of the document collections.
The present inventors have recognized one or more problems with this conventional way of organizing content along topical lines using TOCs. For example, one problem is that users often have a desire for content that spans across two or more topical collections, and thus two or more corresponding TOCs. Yet, the TOCs are organized and accessed separately from each other, leaving users the chore of navigating separate TOCs to find the information they need. It is possible to build a new TOC that combines the two or more TOCs; however, this is time-consuming and inefficient, when one considers the number of combined topics that would be desirable for users.
Accordingly, the present inventors identified a need for improved ways of using TOCs.